A Brief, Brief History of Time

This particular work is for those of you who either can't be arsed to read (or reread) Brief History of Time... or if you have read it and want a laugh... or something. Anycase, It's funny.

And long, did I mention long?

I think I'm going to cry. Or kill things.

Tonight, instead of watching CSI and doing something cerebral on my computer, the XBox will be pulled out and I will be blendering my way through foolish ninjas or something.

We have several Sun Fire 4800 servers. These are midrange, modular, nifty-spiffy-keen chunks of hardware. One of them is named 'strider', and _was_ on loan to us from Sun. 12 CPUs, 24 GB ram. This thing has three 'System Boards'. the SBs each have 4 CPUs, 8gb RAM on them, and can be independently started and stopped and hot-plugged. Nifty-spiffy-keen.

When I booted this server two days ago, it b0rk3d hard. two out of three SBs faulted.

Log messages turned up jack shit on one of the two, so they would only send out one replacement board, for the one that was obviously bad.

Two days from hell ensue.

The replacement came this morning and, when plugged in, did a fair imitation of the gal from the Exorcist. It was, in fact, worse than the board it was supposed to replace. So we phoned that in.

Then we ran a ridiculously-thorough, takes-two-hours boot test against the other broken SB (SB0). It passed with flying colors.

The replacement for SB4 came in, we plugged that in, did a quick test, looks happy. Fine, okay, looks good. Brought them all back together, decided I was sick of heavy-duty boot tests, set it to quick boot.

SB0 blows up again. On a quick, cursory test, when it hadn't on the two-hour-long one. We already sent the tech off an hour ago.

This system makes me sad.

edit: Ninja Gaiden. So much blood. I've expiated my anger at that poor beleaguered system. The tech shows up in the morning.